The display of elements in a list or grids is a very common pattern in mobile applications. The user sees a collection of items and can scroll through them. The collection of items can be a list, a grid or another structured representations of data.

The RecyclerView widget is a more advanced and flexible version of ListView. This widget is a container for displaying large data sets that can be scrolled very efficiently by maintaining a limited number of views. Use the RecyclerView widget when you have data collections whose elements change at runtime based on user action or network events.

The RecyclerView class simplifies the display and handling of large data sets by providing:

Layout managers for positioning items

Default animations for common item operations, such as removal or
addition of items

You also have the flexibility to define custom layout managers and animations for RecyclerView widgets.

To use the RecyclerView widget, you have to specify an adapter and a layout manager. To create an adapter, extend the RecyclerView.Adapter class. The details of the implementation depend on the specifics of your dataset and the type of views.

A layout manager positions item views inside a RecyclerView and determines when to reuse item views that are no longer visible to the user. To reuse (or recycle) a view, a layout manager may ask the adapter to replace the contents of the view with a different element from the dataset. Recycling views in this manner improves performance by avoiding the creation of unnecessary views or performing expensive findViewById() lookups.

The adapter provides access to the items in your data set, creates views for items, and replaces the content of some of the views with new data items when the original item is no longer visible. The following code example shows a simple implementation for a data set that consists of an array of strings displayed using TextView widgets.

public class MyAdapter extends RecyclerView.Adapter<MyAdapter.ViewHolder> {
private String[] mDataset;
// Provide a reference to the views for each data item
// Complex data items may need more than one view per item, and
// you provide access to all the views for a data item in a view holder
public static class ViewHolder extends RecyclerView.ViewHolder {
// each data item is just a string in this case
public TextView mTextView;
public ViewHolder(TextView v) {
super(v);
mTextView = v;
}
}
// Provide a suitable constructor (depends on the kind of dataset)
public MyAdapter(String[] myDataset) {
mDataset = myDataset;
}
// Create new views (invoked by the layout manager)
@Override
public MyAdapter.ViewHolder onCreateViewHolder(ViewGroup parent,
int viewType) {
// create a new view
View v = LayoutInflater.from(parent.getContext())
.inflate(R.layout.my_text_view, parent, false);
// set the view's size, margins, paddings and layout parameters
...
ViewHolder vh = new ViewHolder(v);
return vh;
}
// Replace the contents of a view (invoked by the layout manager)
@Override
public void onBindViewHolder(ViewHolder holder, int position) {
// - get element from your dataset at this position
// - replace the contents of the view with that element
holder.mTextView.setText(mDataset[position]);
}
// Return the size of your dataset (invoked by the layout manager)
@Override
public int getItemCount() {
return mDataset.length;
}
}

First add the support library to your project: Within the app’s build.gradle file, add the dependency.